Simplicity is hard to get
Sunday, September 16th, 2007I’ve just seen the new web application Jottit, and I liked the way they get simplicity right.
Because simplicity and elegance is not only in the way it looks, but also: in the size of the web pages, in the URL naming scheme, and most importantly in the interaction design.
About the web page size, do you know many sites with under-1KB size pages? To compare, what about sites with over-100KB size pages? Why would size matter — because more people are browsing the web on mobile phones; but also because simplicity and elegance mean minimalism, i.e. not to put on a page stuff that’s not needed. It doesn’t matter that the slack is not visible because it’s hidden inside the HTML source, having an unnecessarily large page is still a violation.
The URL naming scheme is of paramount importance, yet it’s surprising how much developers aren’t aware of this. I created a test page on Jottit, and it has the URL http://javia.jottit.com/. You can’t get the URL simpler than this. The URL must be short, semantic, and without arbitrary, meaningless parts in it. If you have to put some data key somewhere (in the URL or in a Cookie) make it short! Look at Jottit, when they put a page-code in the URL, it has 4 characters: http://jottit.com/xy4v/ .
Let’s compare: I was recently looking for where to host an open source project. Sourceforge.net is the venerable site, and I have respect for the good they did for many open-source projects, but the site IMO sucks. It is as complicated as it can get! I think they worked hard to put as much stuff as possible on as many pages as possible. And one of the smaller details: they also own the domain name sf.net, which only redirects to sourceforge.net. I can’t begin to understand why, having such an incredibly valuable domain name available, the 2-letter SF.net, they don’t use it. If my project was named let’s say “foo”, I’d love a domain name like “foo.sf.net”.
Google Code Project Hosting (I hope I got the official name right) is a breeze compared to Sourceforge, it is much simpler. Much better. I’d recommend GCPH (Google Code Project Hosting) to anybody over Sourceforge, if only for all the hassle you save yourself when creating a new project. Yet GCPH si far from perfect: they don’t get the URL naming scheme! Let’s consider a project named “menstral”, it will have this URL: http://code.google.com/p/menstral/, and the subversion repository URL http://menstral.googlecode.com/svn/. The problems with these URL names is: 2 different domain names (code.google.com and googlecode.com) inside a single project, and the redundant and arbitrary “p” in the project’s main URL. The URL for the project should have been http://menstral.googlecode.com.
The conclusion: bravo to Jottit for setting a new standarnd in simplicity and giving us an example. And I have a feature request for them: get HTTPS to work on all pages.